I am a Burmese exile taking a near-permanent refuge in New York and Sydney. Here are my essays about Burma and anything else I feel like writing about. And posting the articles I like from selected sites. Bridging Burma to the world this Blog is more of a Politically-Oriented Literary Blog than a Plain News Blog or a Sophisticated Thoughts Blog.

Monday, September 26, 2016

Muslims Murdered Jordanian Writer For Jihadi Cartoon

Prominent Jordanian Writer Assassinated
by Islamist Extremist. Nahed Hattar was assassinated outside a courtroom where
he was to stand trial for insulting Islam for a cartoon he posted mocking
jihadis.

Prominent Jordanian writer, journalist and left-wing political activist
Nahed Hattar was assassinated outside a courtroom where he was to stand trial for
insulting Islam. Hattar was arrested August 13 for publishing a cartoon on
Facebook that was a sarcastic comment on jihadi fighters.

The cartoon showed a bearded man in
heaven smoking, lying in bed with women and calling on God (who is seen peeking
through the curtains of his tent) to bring him wine and cashews. At the time,
Hattar wrote under the cartoon, “It mocks terrorists and their concept of God
and heaven. It does not infringe God’s divinity in anyway.” He deleted the post
shortly afterwards but was nevertheless arrested.

Upon his release on September 8,
Hattar, who was fighting the charges, wrote, “I am mocking the terrorists and
their conception of hell and heaven,” Mr Hattar wrote shortly before his death.
“I’m not insulting the supreme Allah, at all, on the contrary, I’m against the
type of God that the terrorists worship.”

Hattar was assassinated by a Salafist
imam named as Riad Abdullah, who was known for his extremist ideology.
Abdullah, who had worked for the Jordanian government, both in the ministry of
religious endowments and culture and education, shot Hattar five times in the
head and chest and once in the hand. Abdullah, an electrical engineer by trade,
had been fired from his governmental posts for his extremism. He had left the
country and returned the day he murdered Hattar.

Hattar, a Christian and a communist,
was an avid supporter of Hezbollah and Syrian President Assad, as well as a
champion of the Palestinian cause in Israel. He wrote in the pro-Hezbollah
Lebanese paper Al-Akbar. He had been arrested a number of times before in
Jordan.

The assassination rocked Jordan just
days after a successful election in which Islamists were allowed to
participate. The Islamist party, the National Action Front, condemned the
assassination.

Analyst say that Abdullah chose to
assassinate Hattar in front of the court to send a message to the Jordanian
government that there is no place in Jordan that the Salafists do not control. The
assassination marks the first murder of a journalist in Jordan and the first
poltical assassination in many years.